Whole wheat contains besides the usual carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. The vitamins are concentrated in the outer layer of the kernel. Refining retains mainly the carbohydrates, and eliminates most of the vitamins. Both zinc and cadmium are found in wheat grain: the zinc in the outer layer, the cadmium in the grain centre. Milling removes the zinc, but retains the cadmium: beneficial is eradicated, the malignant is maintained.

The final product lasts longer since even the oils are lost, but it is without fiber. This is an unwanted development since fiber less paste sticks in the crevices of the teeth and causes caries. It also leads to constipation. But like white sugar, and like satellites, VCRs and airports, white bread is another major symbol of modern civilization.

Having discovered that the technology that produces white bread also ruins it nutritionally, millers in western countries now add synthetic vitamins and minerals to the flour they use to make bread. So we have 'vitamin-enriched' bread! Technology first eliminates the vitamins and minerals from the flour, and then shores it up through synthetic inputs.

Poleszynski's United Nations University study concludes that the best way to relate to wheat and flour is the Indian way.

Rudolf Ballantine writes: 'The Indians continue, as they have done for thousands of years, to quietly grind their flour with stone mills and sift out the coarsets 5 percent producing a bread (roti, chapati and phulka) both wholesome and digestible. It seems likely that this process approaches the ideal, and there is no reason why modern steel roller mills could not be adapted to produce a similar product.

The periodic visits made by our roti-eaters to the flour mill are necessitated by the fact that the germ of the wheat contains oils. Consequently, whole wheat flour, from which such oils have not been removed, tends to go rancid. Since whole grains do not spoil for years, it makes sense to mill only small amounts at a time. The solution on the whole is modest, ingenious. But it is unglamorous. What is modern must be welcomed, otherwise people will say we are living in the eighteenth century and not in the twenty-first! Besides, we have so many dental colleges, and their products suffer from an unemployment problem. The proliferation of caries among the population could keep all dentists gainfully employed, and add to economic growth.

The periodic milling to wheat by Indian households is a prime example of an older technology that cannot be updated or improved by modern science. It is in fact a form of permanent or constantly unhappy with itself, continuously engaged in modifying its technologies till we have reached a point where such modification has become an end in itself. Once modification itself becomes a source of profit, it seems a natural process, something the human species has always been doing since it felt the need for technology.

Fortunately, a large number of people intend to preserve the older system of milling their wheat to prepare their rotis. They may not know that their habits have recently been vindicated in world forums such as the UNU. But this does not matter. More important is the planner's prejudice, which, as in the case of sugar, has blindly convinced him that large-scale sugar factories and flour mills are the answers to modern India's needs. Such opinions are getting increasingly difficult to maintain in the light of more knowledge. But the bondage to modernity is of a peculiar kind. Often, its alleged superiority or advantage is thrust upon us only to conceal the fact that some bureaucrat has made a commission on some sale of technology (which this country may not at all need).